= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Manfred comments on What is Evil about creating House Elves? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (58)
I suppose it boils down to two things.
1) The ethics of wireheading someone else. It doesn't feel like "real" utility to create something that's just compelled to act a certain way. Utility doesn't transfer like that. Whether the elves are fulfilling their own utility function has no necessary bearing on mine, nor does it make anything moral - imagine creating orcs instead, for an example of a clearly immoral utility function.
2) The non-PETA reason for making laws about animal abuse: not because of animals, but because of humans. For example, being cruel to animals is an excellent predictor of being cruel to people, possibly causal, and I doubt the 'animals' saying "please sir, hit me again" is going to help any.
wireheading doesn't feel like wireheading from the inside. ask a meth addict.
I regard all living creatures as already being wireheaded. it's just an imperfect enough wireheading that we have latitude in our values.
Sorry, I don't know any meth addicts. But I think your statement may be because "like" and "need" are two different things - it's possible for the brain to need something but not find it particularly pleasurable (about a third of the smokers I know don't enjoy smoking in itself, and over 3/4ths all don't enjoy it once they factor in the cancer). Any decent job of wireheading could avoid this, though.
Wireheading is hijacking the signals that originally help our brains learn / act / adapt / etc, and just hammering on a few of them. It doesn't make sense to me to say that all life is already wireheaded, because in the beginning there was nothing to hijack.
You are assuming unmodified humans are doing the creating and are also using the agents. Point 2) can be made moot by modifying the users so as to eliminate damage to them.
True. Though this is not the case in the Harry Potter novels.